Thursday, November 29, 2012

I was taking a much-needed break from keeping an eye on my weird neighbors, whom I suspiciously think are some of the idiots who elected the commie knot-head Obama instead of electing the religious knot-head Romney.
Of course, my heart was with Ron Paul the whole time, who would have been a good president -- perhaps even a terrific president! -- forty years ago when there was still enough time to stop the suicidally-stupid deficit-spending, money-printing, entitlement-creating, government-centric, "impossibly huge government taking care of everyone," typical Democrat horse-crap nonsense.
And maybe back then he would even have gotten get us back on a gold standard monetary system, with no fractional reserve banking allowed, to automatically make the currency as strong as the inflation-free economy, because it would be based, as it should be, on real, sustainable demand, instead of relying on phony government deficit-spending-financed demand, with a crazy Federal Reserve creating the excess money and credit to buy up all the gluttonous globs of government debt.
And, as reasons to print money, let's not forget that Consumer Installment Debt astoundingly went up by about $250 billion -- a quarter of a trillion dollars! -- over the past year, and that money had to come from somewhere, too!
I mean, it's all freak, freak, freaking me out here! Gaahhhh!
So, I was trying to focus my Mighty Mogambo Mind (MMM) on something new to stop my thinking about what idiots we are and how completely devastating it will be when that far-left Obama (who has horrifically given himself, Stalin-like, the power to order Americans murdered without a trial!) really gets started.
I was thinking of starting a completely new career, never to think of that ugly economics stuff again. Sleep well at night without waking up screaming in fear at the inflationary horror that awaits us, dreaming of devouring demons!
It's that kind of "fear" thing that makes me figure that people would LOVE to have some comedy when the whole thing starts falling apart because the evil Federal Reserve is creating so much, so much, so impossibly much money, and, predictably, inflation in prices is skyrocketing, people are rioting, cities are burning, murderous gangs roam the streets, zombies are eating the dead, aliens from outer space have landed, and blah blah blah. You know.
So, seeing the obvious opportunity, I was considering being a (ta-da!) stand-up comedian!
I had even been working on my new act, as the other choice that occurred to me was "homicidal maniac," instead of being just an irritating, gold-bug, paranoid, angry, cynical old man and all-around nice guy.
And since it doesn't take a lot of planning or training to be a homicidal maniac, I chose that option as my "fallback" position, and was working on my stand-up comedy routine. In fact, I had already written one terrific joke! I was on my way!
It goes, "Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he wanted to get the hell out of this stupid country before the monetary and fiscal madnesses of, respectively, the evil Federal Reserve and the corrupt governments of the federal, state and local varieties destroy our money, the economy, the Whole Freaking Country (WFC), and probably the Whole Freaking World (WFW) with horrendous inflation in prices caused by such irresponsible over-creation of money and debt, all to create a huge, suffocating, government-centric economy, so that you slowly starve to death because you can't afford food.
"But the 'all natural and organic' weight-loss makes looks you look fashionably thin the whole time! Hahahaha!"
After a brief pause, I deliver the boffo punch line, which is "Except for maybe, you know, that part at the end, right before you die, where your bones literally stick through your skin. Hahahaha!"
I deliberately put that "Hahahaha!" at the end so that the audience -- and maybe Jay Leno would be watching! -- would all know that it was a joke, and that they should applaud like maniacs and laugh heartily at this classic Mogambo Dark Humor Of The Damned (MDHOTD).
So you can see that my life was, for a change, working out just fine, and I was really getting into this comedy thing, when I, coincidentally, got a devastating email from Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) Paul P, who had written a much funnier original joke.
After the obligatory sniveling and servile salutation "Oh Mighty Mogambo," JMR Paul humorously writes "With the economy being so crappy I have decided to join the army and change my name to Clifford Fiscal. That way, during roll call when they call out 'Fiscal, Cliff', I can yell back 'It's here! Here I tells ya!'"
I, of course, laughed, even as my Mighty Mogambo Heart (MMH) was breaking because his joke was better than my joke, all my plans are for suddenly and cruelly for naught, and I'm actually kind of pissed about it, now that I think about it.So, I am laughing, sad, and angry, all at the same time. You can see how that "homicidal maniac" idea seems suddenly so easy and natural.Of course, when it comes to easy and natural, 4,500 years of history says ain't nuthin' easier than capitalizing on these kinds of inflationary idiocies of government: Buy gold, silver and oil! And keep on buying them, gradually, more and more, month by month. And when any one of them drops significantly in price for no apparent reason, as they mysteriously do from time to time because of all the corruption and manipulation of markets these days, then buy LOTS more!See? It's easy! Repeat along with me: "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

As I stood in the line at the grocery store, I watched the
family in front of me, which reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting; an
all-American family, out happily shopping together, what with the mom, the dad,
and the two little kids.

As I watched, my heart went out to them, knowing that they
had no clue as to the economic cataclysm that is going to befall all of them,
especially the cute little kids.So I
kindly stepped forward to help them.

I leaned forward towards them and politely said "Pardon
me, but I see that you are buying Froot Loops cereal for, I assume, your
darling children. And speaking of Froot Loops, did you know that the horrid
Obama deliberately deficit-spent a monstrous $1.5 trillion every year for the
last four years, which was on top of the $2.4 trillion that the government
already collected in taxes, fees, expenses, tip, tag and title?"

Well, bless their hearts, they predictably tried their best
to ignore me, and I could see them furtively looking around for a way to get
away from me.Unfortunately, there were
other shoppers in the checkout line ahead of them, blocking their path.And I had cleverly stationed my shopping
cart between them and me, both blocking the aisle to prevent their retreat, and
(very importantly!) keeping out of range.

In their best interests, I earnestly continued my loud line
of highly-instructional questioning by asking them "And did you know that
his blithely increasing the national debt by a whopping, eye-watering,
gag-inducing, terrifying six trillion bucks in 4 short years is equal to a
staggering 40% of our $15 trillion GDP? That's almost half of our Entire
Freaking Economy (EFE)!"

I could feel my panic growing as I continued instructing
them "And did you know that it was all outrageously heaped on the aching
backs of the 300 million overly-indebted men, women and children living in this
country?"

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the store manager
coming towards us, huffing and puffing, with that "Oh, no! Not you
again!" look on his stupid face.

Instantly I knew that I had to make a crucial tactical
decision: Whether or not to abandon my groceries, leap atop the checkout
counter, run to the end to make a glorious, fabulous, flying leap towards the
door and thus making my getaway, taking my leave with my standard shout of
farewell, "Buy gold, silver and oil, you morons!"

To do so, however, would be to suffer the sad, sorry loss of
a lot of delicious "buy one, get two free" frozen burritos, and who
knows when they are going to have a sale like THAT again? I mean, c'mon! What
to do? What to do?

I thought to myself "My time to educate these people
grows short if I am to, heroically, before the manager gets here, teach these
morons about how the evil Federal Reserve is creating So Freaking Much Money
(SFMM) that inflation in prices will destroy those who do not wisely buy gold,
silver and oil!"

Quickly, I summed up by saying "And this is just the
INCREASE in the national debt to an incomprehensible $16 trillion, which is
already bigger than the aforementioned Entire Freaking Economy (EFE), which
comes to a debt of $53,000 dollars for each of you two adults, and the two
little tykes, too, which comes to a nice, round $212,000 just for YOUR little
family. How you like them apples?"

I was hoping they would, at least, enjoy my witty reference
to apples as we are in a grocery store.

But no. Seeing that I was getting nowhere with the adults, I
turned to the kids and said, "Kids, enjoy that Froot Loops cereal, because
soon prices will be so high that you will be eating horrible, soupy, microwave
gruel, making the huge assumption that your folks will have a microwave oven
and can afford the electricity to cook gruel, unless your parents wise up and start
buying gold, silver and oil!"

Just then, the little manager comes storming up and says,
predictably, "You again?"

I said "Yes!'Tis I, The Wise And Wonderful Mogambo (TWAWM), spreading the gospel of
TWAWM, namely the revelation to buy gold and silver to capitalize on the
guaranteed cataclysmic inflation in prices that you get whenever your idiot
government is allowing the Federal Reserve to create so excessively much, so
monstrously much, so stupendously much, so impossibly much money and credit. And
proud to do so, sir!"

I was thinking to myself, of course, "And there ain't
nothing you can do about it, you little bastard who probably has all his
retirement funds idiotically 'invested' in common stocks and/or in the most
ludicrously overpriced asset of all, namely bonds, and who is going to
tragically get The Royal Screw Job (TRSJ) because of it."

The bad news is that the store manager stood there, glaring
at me, the whole time I am in his stupid little store, and I am wisely keeping
my mouth shut, just in case I put a lot of innocent frozen burritos in
jeopardy.

But the good news is not only did I, Mogambo, heroically
help a young family with TWAWM, but when their turn soon came to check out,
they just pushed their cart out of the way and ran out the door!I was
able to start checking out right away! Great!

It just goes to show you one more way, on top of a million
other ways, that good things happen to those who buy gold, silver and oil.

And that is, perhaps, also one more reason that people who
buy gold, silver and oil say "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

Monday, November 12, 2012

The elections being over, I shall not unduly comment on the
reelection of the horrid Obama, or the un-professional, traitorous hacks of the
leftist media that kept his many scandals, incompetences and disgraceful lies
out of the news, or about the trusting, gullible, ignorant, greedy and stupid
people who elected him, except to quote the immortal Thomas Jefferson, who said
"The government you elect is the government
you deserve."

But it was H.L. Mencken who said it best, as far as I am
concerned, when he quipped "People deserve the government they get, and
they deserve to get it good and hard," which naturally brings to mind all
those times in life when one has, indeed, gotten it "good and hard,"
dredging up, as it does, painful memories, usually replete with scars, either
physical or mental, often both, and with a deep, dark, dangerous desire for
some kind of vicious, bloodthirsty revenge on some worthless bastard who
deserves it "good and hard."

So ol' H.L. (as I like to call him since it implies that I
am a hotshot smart guy on a collegial, first-name basis with a fellow famous
and cynical intellectual, but who died when I was seven years old, which is
pretty weird, probably says a lot about OTHER weird things about me, when you
stop and think about it) was exactly right with the getting it "good and
hard" thing.

Now, getting it "good and hard" perfectly
describes the current situation, which is that there is No Way In Hell (NWIH)
that our aforementioned "current situation" CAN'T end badly, as in
"very badly," as in "financially and economically fatal"
because trillions and trillions of dollars pumped into the welfare economy via
federal government deficit-spending Every Freaking Year (EFY), and tragically
combined with "and there ain't nothin' you can do about it, moron."

Even worse, if the government
truly reflects the population, then (not to put too fine a point on it) we are
a nation of lying, corrupt, greedy, stupid, ignorant, superstitious,
bankrupted, lowlife, low-IQ murderers and thieves.

My low, low
opinion of the government and the general population of the USA is, by sheer
coincidence, perfectly reflected in a CNSNews.com
news item sent to me by Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) Phil S.It
read "On Aug. 2,
2011, President Obama signed a deal he had negotiated with congressional
leaders to increase the debt limit of the federal government by $2.4 trillion.
But, now, after only 15 months, almost all of that additional borrowing
authority has been exhausted."

Now, to the casual reader who knows anything about
economics, this seems like bad news. And it is! Congratulations on your
perspicuity!

You know
things are getting weird when I, out of the blue, use words like
"perspicuity," and, I am sorry to say, it is worse than that.This
is to be expected since the government is (as previously described) a group of lying, corrupt, greedy, stupid, ignorant,
superstitious, bankrupted, lowlife, low-IQ murderers and thieves, as is proved when, later in the same news
item, we learn that "according to the Daily Treasury Statement (DTS), the
portion of the federal debt subject to the legal limit was
$16,222,235,000,000--just $171.765 billion below the $16,394,000,000 debt
limit."

Did you see the part that read "the
portion of the federal debt subject to the legal limit"? What?What in the hell is THIS? There is a portion of
government spending NOT subject to the debt limit?!?There is some secret debt not subject to
limits? What in the hell is going on here?!?

And if the words "gigantic,""gagging-up-blood,""We're Freaking Doomed (WFD)!" and
"disastrous" are not enough to scare the hell out of you that
inflation in prices from such a whopping huge increase in the money supply is
going to destroy you and everyone you love, even when punctuated with an
exclamation point for additional emphasis, then perhaps an actual number will
convince you: $2.4 trillion over 15 months equals a massive 13% of GDP in One
Freaking Year (OFY)!!"

Please note the TWO exclamation points,
conveniently provided to you by yours truly, to instantly draw the appropriate
(and only) conclusion without any thinking, of any kind, on your part, which is
the handy kind of conclusion I like best, as do, I'll guess, you.

And if you are not buying gold, silver and oil
with every dollar you have, and with every dollar you can weasel out of your
wife's purse, or with every dollar gotten by shortchanging the kids on their
allowances, then there is something very, very wrong with you, and you should
see a therapist of some kind, or at least wear a sign around your neck that
says "I am stupid!" so that people will have pity on you instead of
laughing at you.

On the other hand, for those of us who ARE furiously buying the
aforementioned gold, silver and oil with the aforementioned sources of cash,
our "therapy" is the happy, secure feeling we get when we buy them,
knowing that their values will soar, soar, SOAR in the catastrophic price
inflation and social destruction it causes, and we are merrily thinking to
ourselves "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The horror of our economic situation is, for some weird reason,
made even more terrifying on Halloween, when the little darlings from the
neighborhood come to the door with their annual "Trick or Treat"
tomfoolery, knowing that it is going to cost me money.

I find that I can no longer frighten them away by popping up
with the usual scary masks, fangs, fake blood, or even screaming at them at the
top of my lungs, my face bent down to theirs, nose to nose, "You're going
to die!Die!You and your parents will die horrible,
painful, lingering deaths because the evil Federal Reserve is creating so much
money that it will cause so much inflation in prices that you will all starve
to death! Have some candy! Happy Halloween!"

This year, I decided that I was becoming stale.That is why, this year, I greeted them by
saying "Happy Halloween! Have some candy!Eat up! Enjoy it while you can, kids, and eat all this yummy candy to
make yourself fat and sweet because your parents will soon have to kill you,
probably while you are sleeping, and then use big, sharp knives to cut out your
bones and organs to sell on the black market, and then cut up what's left of
you into little pieces before they cook you.And then they will eat you, maybe topped with some tangy barbeque sauce
made out of your congealed blood sautéed in butter with some minced onion,
brown sugar, maybe a little mustard, salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste,
topped with a festive sprig of fresh parsley, all because the prices of food,
and the prices of everything else, are so high that they cannot afford to buy
regular food! Fatten up, kids!"

As I am dishing out handfuls Halloween candy to each of the
kids, I continued in Fine Mogambo Style (FMS), loudly yelling at the kids anew,
asking "And you want to know why? Huh? You want to know why you are going
to be killed and made into hamburgers? It's
because the evil Federal Reserve is creating so terrifyingly much money, and
thus creating horrifying, murderous inflation in prices. And they are doing it to
-- incredibly! -- allow the corrupt, insane federal government to give money to
literally half the population by irresponsibly deficit-spending the equivalent
of a full 10% of the Whole Freaking Economy (WFE), and, in the process, racking
up insane, suffocating amounts of painful, bankrupting debt that cannot
possibly be repaid!"

By this time, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the
concerned parents are no longer patiently waiting in the street, but are coming
up to see why I am yelling at their kids and the other trick-or-treaters,
making them scream and cry, but still wanting for me to give them more candy,
the greedy little beggars.

The parents call out anxiously "Angela! Are you okay?
Why are you crying?", and "Jimmy, get away from the creepy, horrible
man!"

Immediately sensing that they are nervous and distressed, I
soothingly tell the concernedparents
"Of course they are okay, you lowlife morons! They are crying in fear
because they have seen the ugly future, a destroyed, nasty, barbaric world
after an insane Federal Reserve has created untold more trillions and trillions
of dollars in new money and debt, until the buying power of the massively over-produced
dollars falls to zero. And it scares them, as it should!"

Keeping the kids carefully herded into a tight group standing
between me and their strangely-and-suddenly angry parents descending upon me, I
quickly explained "I was just trying to help your children learn to buy
gold, silver and oil to capitalize on the inflationary horror destined to
devour them, since you seem to be too stupid to understand any of it!"

Then, surprisingly, one of them yells out "If you are
so smart, how come the velocity of money is going down?"Well, I gotta tell ya, I was pretty
astonished at this odd turn of events!

And so was everyone else, apparently, as suddenly everything
got very quiet, and everyone was looking right at me.

Well, of course, the reason is that the velocity of money is
merely a plug figure, equal to GDP divided by the money supply. This comes from
the famous Fisher equation where the Price of things sold, times Quantity of
things sold, equals Money supply times the Velocity of money (turnover in
financing transactions), or, more familiarly, PQ = MV.

Since PQ is essentially the Gross Domestic Product (GDP),
the idle calculation of velocity of money is made simplistically easy by simply
dividing the money supply into GDP, which are two readily-available figures, thus
perhaps explaining its popularity.

In general, when the denominator (Money supply) goes up
faster than the numerator (Price times Quantity sold, or GDP), the calculation
of Velocity will, by simple arithmetic, go down, and when things are
vice-versa, vice-versa.

In this case, though, the question seemed apt, though the Halloween
setting seemed odd, as the Money supply is undeniably rising rapidly, making
Velocity go down, but Prices are obviously rising, making Velocity go up, and
Quantity sold is disastrously going down, making Velocity go down.

But remember: Velocity is the result of three variables, and
velocity could be rising (a supposedly good sign) although Prices were
exploding upward (a bad economic sign) and the Money supply was rising (another
bad economic sign) if Quantity sold was actually falling (a very bad economic
sign).

With all due respect to the singer Meatloaf and his immortal
song, maybe two out of three ain't bad, but not so when zero out of three is,
without a doubt, bad.

So I answered, in that strangely cryptic, monotonic, robotic
way that visitors from other planets have when addressing Earthling
carbon-units, "Velocity has fallen because the ratio of the numerator to
the denominator went down. Surrender, Earthlings. Resistance is futile."

I expected, if not a suddenly-enlightened crowd cheering and
shouting my praises for my illuminating insight in interpreting PQ=MV, at least
a brief smattering of polite applause for my pithy profundity.

Well, there MAY have been some of that, but it was drowned
out by shouts of "You're crazy!" and "Quit trying to look up my
wife's skirt!" and "Burn him and take all his candy!"

At least, I THINK that is what they were saying, because by
that time I have scurried off, safe and sound inside the Fabulous, Fully-Fortified
Mogambo Bunker (FFFMB), and all I hear is muffled voices through the thick
walls.

In the sudden silent solitude, I realized that the kids got
the candy treat, referred to in "Trick or Treat,", but their moron
parents got the trick, in that I did not get a chance to tell them to
frantically buy gold, silver and oil to prevent their looming and dooming
calamity.

But, then again, they would not have listened.They never do.That's the way it is with most Earthlings.

About Me

The Mogambo Guru
Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications. For podcasts featuring the Mogambo.